05 February 2009

Forward thinking cities have been deconstructing parts of freeways. In Cincinnati, we have leaders like Christopher Smitherman, head of the local NAACP, who believe the future is to add even more lanes to the freeways:

We need to focus on bread-and-butter projects such as repairing sidewalks, medians, potholes; or expanding driving lanes on Interstates... -C Smitherman in letter to Obama last week

Walter Kulash is regarded as a genius in his field. In my memory, he's the only traffic engineer who ever appeared in a story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The headline was, "A Traffic Engineer Who Thinks Cities Could Use A Little More Congestion" or something like that.

He was on the team that redesigned Fort Washington Way, narrowing it by half and extending the street grid to reconnect downtown with our riverfront.

I once saw an old map (circa 1970) down at the library downtown that showed I-471 continuing straight, past where it currently ends near 275 in Kentucky, and joining up with I-71 where it splits from I-75. Had this section been built, I bet there would have been a good chance that Fort Washington Way could have been scrapped, since we wouldn't really need the connector across downtown. And it would have alleviated traffic on the Brent Spence.

I think the best we can hope for now is for Fort Washington Way to get capped. Maybe that could be one of Obama's "shovel-ready" projects.